Denver and the West

Romney rally at Red Rocks raises issue of government role in economy

Hundreds of workers, among millions employed by government-created entities during the Great Depression, toiled to transform a natural amphitheater at Red Rocks into the functional entertainment venue it is today. (Courtesy of Barbara Forrest Teyssier)

When Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan walk onto the stage at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on Tuesday night, it will be a moment the Republicans' presidential campaign hopes heralds a change to come.

But it will also be a moment symbolic of a change that has already arrived.

Faced with a dampened economic rebound and persistently high unemployment, both candidates in the presidential race this year agree that government should play only a limited role in the economy.

"Government does not create jobs," Romney said during the second presidential debate.

"[A] lot of this campaign, maybe over the last four years, has been devoted to this notion that I think government creates jobs," President Barack Obama said later in the same debate. "... That's not what I believe."

But Red Rocks is an example of a time when government did create jobs — millions of them, as part of Depression-era New Deal employment programs. Hundreds of those workers took the natural amphitheater at Red Rocks and built it into the functioning venue it is today.

Across the country in the late 1930s and early 1940s, government-funded workers built roads, bridges, airports, sewer systems, schools and other government buildings. Critics argued — and still do — that the jobs were unsustainable and that the tax rates that paid for the work did more harm than good. But President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935 vowed, "We will arrange our national economy to end our present unemployment."

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"The general attitude that government was there to solve the problems that capitalism couldn't solve was deep in the American psyche since the Great Depression," said Jeff Madrick, a scholar at the Roosevelt Institute, which is devoted to preserving FDR's legacy.

So what changed in American politics?

Madrick says the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s — civil rights, the Vietnam War, Watergate — embedded a cynicism against government into the minds of Americans.

"It was increasingly easy to blame government for all the problems," he said.

Princeton University professor Julian Zelizer agreed that the change is somewhat a response to that tumultuous era. American politics have shifted toward more conservative values since President Ronald Reagan took office, he said.

But some of the outcomes of the 1960s and 1970s — such as Medicare and Medicaid — also mean that big, proposed government projects have to compete in the budget against big government programs already in existence.

"In the New Deal period, if you think about it, there just wasn't as much federal government there," Zelizer said.

That the debate is occurring now is somewhat fitting, said University of New Mexico history professor Jason Scott Smith. It's the same debate that took place when Roosevelt created the New Deal.

"Perhaps not as much has changed as we might think," Smith wrote in an e-mail. "Government-created jobs were popular, and they were very controversial."

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